© Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Introduction I spent much of the winter of 2010 rummaging through Warsaw’s Archive of Modern Records. Among the various documents in the archive’s posses- sion are tens of thousands of reports submitted by Polish police officers in the 1920s and 1930s concerning the political activity of interwar Poland’s Ukrai- nian, Jewish, Belarusian, German, Russian, Czech and Lithuanian minority populations, who together made up nearly one- third of the country’s inhabit- ants.1 Sifting through these reports, I hoped to gain a better understanding of the dynamic and turbulent political life of Polish Jewish youth on the eve of the Holocaust. One afternoon, after hours of fruitless searching, a particular police report caught my eye. It was written by a Polish officer dispatched in October 1933 to a Zionist rally in Kobryń, a market town of some nine thou- sand residents in eastern Poland. Perhaps to the officer’s surprise, the speeches of the Zionist rally’s organizers were not solely devoted to building a Jewish state in Mandate Palestine. Instead, the speakers, one after the other, insisted that it was the duty of Zionists to defend the borders of Poland. Among the speakers pledging their loyalty to Poland was a lanky nineteen- year- old with thick, round black eyeglasses and hair slicked to his side. The policeman decided to record his name. Men like Menachem Begin, he noted, left a deep impression on the town’s Jews.2 Why was Menachem Begin, who some forty- four years later rose to power as Israel’s first right- wing Zionist prime minister, offering to put his life on the line for Poland? When he described his Polish Jewish past to Israelis, Begin remembered the humiliation, harassment, and violence Jews experienced at the hands of the country’s Catholic majority.3 “The constant danger of pogroms cast its shadow of fear over us,” recalled Begin some twenty- five years after his speech in Kobryń.4 The police report told a different story. 1 For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 2 Introduction Even more questions followed once I discovered that the officer’s report was but one among hundreds that had streamed into the offices of War- saw’s Ministry of Internal Affairs in the 1930s concerning the Zionist youth movement Menachem Begin would eventually lead. Claiming over sixty- five thousand members worldwide, nearly forty thousand of whom were in Poland, the Joseph Trumpeldor League (Brit Yosef Trumpeldor), known by its Hebrew acronym, Betar, was one of the most popular Zionist youth move- ments in interwar Europe.5 It was also one of the most controversial Jewish political organizations of its time. The youth movement’s militaristic ethos, vehement opposition to socialism, and authoritarian leadership cult for the founder of right-w ing Zionism, Vladimir (Zeʾev) Jabotinsky, led many of their opponents—a nd some of their supporters—t o describe its members as “ Jewish fascists.” Even as Betar insisted, perhaps more strenuously than any other Zionist movement, that Jewish life in Poland was doomed to fail, Polish police offi- cers across the country described how the youth movement was placing its pledges of Polish patriotism front and center of their public activity. Some officers recounted how Betar’s leaders marked Zionist celebrations by laying wreaths at Polish war memorials, imploring their followers to “act Polish.”6 Others described how local Betar units requested permission to march in parades alongside Polish scouts and soldiers during the country’s national holidays.7 During brawls with Jewish socialists, Betar’s members could even be heard singing the Polish national anthem and chanting “Long live the Sanacja!,” the name given to Poland’s authoritarian government, which came to power in 1926.8 Why would a Zionist movement convinced that Jews were destined for a life of misery and persecution in Europe choose the Polish national anthem as their battle cry? What inspired them to include among their chants a call to support Poland’s authoritarian regime? By 1933, officials from the Sanacja (Purification) government had tampered with elections, arrested and jailed many of their opponents, and severely limited the power of Poland’s members of parliament.9 What was it about the country’s policies and practices— many of which were already the features of right- wing regimes across Europe— that could be deemed credible, logical, compelling, and even instructive to Zionists seeking to build a Jewish state in Mandate Palestine? These questions lie at the heart of this book, which traces the history of the Betar youth movement in Poland between the two world wars. Although Betar clubs operated in more than twenty- six countries by the 1930s, the majority For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. Introduction 3 of the youth movement’s members lived in the newly formed Polish state, established in 1918.10 Like dozens of Zionist youth movements operating in the country at the time, Betar promised to prepare its members for a new life in the Yishuv, the Jewish community of prestate Palestine, by providing vocational training, Hebrew classes, and lessons in Jewish history. What set Betar apart was its commitment to the military training of Jewish youth, as well as its support of several prominent policies of the European Right. If the heroes of Zionism’s numerous socialist youth movements were pioneers who established agricultural settlements in Mandate Palestine, Betar’s ideal “new Jews” were soldiers, prepared at a moment’s notice to follow the orders of their commander and carry out whatever task was required to bring about the Jew- ish state. They deemed rifles, not ploughs or shovels, to be the most important tools to fulfill Zionism’s goals. Betar’s leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, was described by his supporters and opponents alike as one of the Zionist movement’s most spellbinding orators, brilliant writers, magnetic personalities, and provocative activists. His dark olive skin, widely set eyes, and prominent forehead reinforced the impres- sion among Zionist activists that he was somehow more “goyish” than Jew- ish.11 So too did the elegant style in which he spoke: his Odessan Russian and Germanic Yiddish lent him an almost foreign, aristocratic aura in the eyes of the eastern European Jewish audiences to whom he frequently lectured. His early life looked vastly different from the childhood of other Zionist activists from the Russian Empire, most of whom came from provincial towns and Yiddish- speaking, religiously observant homes. Born in 1880 and raised in the cosmopolitan port city of Odessa, the young Jabotinsky was immersed in Russian language and culture and well read in numerous European languages. Graduating from one of the city’s finest gymnasia, he spent several months at a Swiss university, followed by three years as a student in Italy, where he simultaneously worked as a correspondent for a Russian-l anguage newspaper back in Odessa. Although his early work as a poet, playwright, journalist, and political activist had brought him some recognition in the Zionist movement, he gained fame during the First World War for creating the Jewish Legion, which under his leadership participated in the British Army’s conquest of Ottoman Palestine. He also achieved popularity among Zionists for his role in organizing the Haganah Jewish defense network during the Jerusalem riots of 1920. Soon after, Jabotinsky broke with the mainstream Zionist movement and called for a more aggressive approach to dealing with Mandate Palestine’s British colonial administration and Palestinian Arab population. His Union of For general queries, contact [email protected] © Copyright, Princeton University Press. No part of this book may be distributed, posted, or reproduced in any form by digital or mechanical means without prior written permission of the publisher. 4 Introduction Revisionist Zionists, founded in 1925, would go on to become one of the most popular Zionist organizations in the interwar period.12 Betar’s namesake was the famed Russian army veteran and Zionist activist Joseph Trumpeldor. The same age as Jabotinsky, Trumpeldor worked closely with him in the early stages of the Jewish Legion’s development. He was killed in 1920 during a gun battle defending the Jewish settlement of Tel Hai in the Upper Galilee from Arab militias. Trumpeldor’s death embodied to Jabotinsky the principal message he sought to convey to Jewish youth: in a world where the use of violence was the only way to survive, they had no choice but to “learn to shoot,”13 and become, in the words of Betar’s anthem, “proud, noble and cruel.”14 Only once Jews could prove their indestructible military might, he argued, would Palestinian Arabs be willing to yield to the chief demands of Revisionist Zionists: a Jewish majority living in a Jewish- ruled state or com- monwealth that stretched from the Mediterranean sea to the western borders of today’s Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Fearing backlash from both Mandate Pal- estine’s British rulers and Arab inhabitants, most mainstream Zionists of the era refused to proclaim their goal to be the creation of a state with a Jewish majority. They mocked the Revisionist movement’s geographic aspirations as unrealistic, and condemned its call for the military training of Jewish youth as an unnecessary provocation that would only further aggravate relations between Jews and Palestinian Arabs.